The chief concern in this paper is to show that the translation of literary creation by African writers written in colonial languages is mainly a process of translating silences. In the first place, following the line of Ortega y Gasset’s assessment, the author reviews different kinds of silences that are important in translation, as George Mounin pointed out in his work, Les problèmes théoritiques de la traduction. In the second place, the authors define the concept of “minor literatures” to understand the particularities of the postcolonial African literature in colonial languages. Finally the author illustrates the role of the translator of silences in a postcolonial context by analysing the novel Allah n’est pas obligé by Amadou Kourouma.